Funko Pop James Gunn has 1 guy buying 50 and bragging about it

October 12, 2017

New York Comic Con, also known as NYCC, is one of the big end of year conventions that will have a lot of con exclusives. Over the past few years the company Funko has become more popular and have had more of their items getting sold at the cons. The 2017 NYCC included some of the Pops! that were going to be highly sought after. One of them being the first of the kind, the James Gunn director line for Funko.

This particular Pop had a few reasons as to its popularity. One being it is the first of the Director line for Funko. Another reason is that James Gunn is currently a very popular director due to his very successful movies Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 & 2. Then there was also the fact it was a NYCC exclusive that was limited to only 500 pieces.

In the last couple of years Funko has made the con exclusives a shared item. That means that if you didn’t make it to the convention then you can try to get one of the Funko items at a store or online. How this works is that people, myself included, will get online the first night of the convention. In this case it was Thursday October 5, 2017, at midnight.

Exactly what day and time the companies will post the items for sale is usually unknown. Sometimes with a lot of waiting, searching, and maybe little luck, a general time frame will be given. However, for the most part the times aren’t known so it’s a game of sitting, waiting, and hitting refresh on the computer a lot. There’s another option and that’s to take the chance of going to a physical store when it opens to get them. Some stores are ok when they put them out and are getting better but it’s still near impossible to be able to go to all the stores to get them in time and you still might have to wait in a line for some stores.

Now some of the items, like the James Gunn exclusive, was sold at the con and only on the Funko site shop. From what I have read, the amount sold at the convention was 400 or maybe a few over that and the amount sold online was 100 or under 100. To say that this was going to be a difficult one to get would be like saying the sun is a bit warm.

Here’s basically how fast these went from being available to being sold out.

1,2,3.

That’s right, count to 3 seconds and they were gone.

At first the majority of people, me included, thought that they were sold out because of how few in number there were of it. Over the past week someone on twitter going by the name of, “ernnytheman”, has been bragging about how he used a bot to get 50 of the James Gunn. This has caused a lot of anger in the groups that collect these, including myself.

Funko had a limit of 1 per person on this but this person has been able to circumvent the rules and the programs that are in place to catch the bots that can buy like this. Now you might wonder why this would make me and others upset, I know there are people I know that don’t collect that are asking me why I am so upset. This is because an item that I wanted, waited for, then spent days, not minutes or hours, but days sitting on a computer hitting refresh to attempt to get only 1 for myself was bought mainly from 1 person and now is being sold on ebay for between $400-$1,000. Yes, this $15 item is selling for that much and that means unless I win the lottery for millions, then I won’t be getting this particular Pop.

What makes it worse is that this person has decided to brag about getting it. It’s one thing if you do it secretly and the people who tried to buy think it was sold out by each people getting 1 or maybe even 2. But to come out and brag about it while knowing, ( I can’t say that this same person is selling the ones he got for under the ebay prices but the likelihood is slim that he is), but knowing that these are selling for hundreds of dollars is a slap in the face to people like me who only wanted the 1 for our collections.

I understand if you get 1 or 2 and then turn around to sell, even at a high price, but to have the one purpose of getting almost all of them just so you can sell them for outrageous prices is what angers me. This is no different than a gas station that is the only station that has gas putting the prices extremely high because they know people will buy it. This person knew that by buying 50 of them he was taking away from the thousands of people who wanted to have for the sole purpose of selling for hundreds of dollars.

In one post he makes a comment, “Karma for doing what? Providing food for my kids? Paying for their tuition? Paying my bills? Damn that’s some bad karma”. Ok, are you doing these things in a normal manner in say like a job where you worked all day to earn the money? No. If a guy who tricks an elderly person out of their money says he was only doing it to pay his bills and for his kids, would that make it right? This was what was done. He cheated the system, used a program that would go around the rule of only allowing 1 item per person and then marks up the price and uses his children and bills as an excuse.

Also, if you are going to be that person who is using their children as an excuse for doing this, then where did you get the money to pay for the orders? Going off a estimate of what this would cost, the Pop was $15, then if he had each order shipped to a different name that would mean 50 separate orders with shipping on each at around $5.99, then tax, and that means roughly around $1,150 spent on this one item. There’s also the others that he had done with the other NYCC of the Freddy Funko one where he brags about getting 500. That’s $11,500 spent. So, if you are saying you only did this to get food for your kids and pay for their tuition, then why are you spending upwards of $13,000 in one weekend on items that might or might not sell? Wouldn’t that 13k go a long way in paying for food? And if you are someone that has the amount of money to risk spending $13,000 on something you might break even on or even gain an extra thousand or even few thousand after a month or longer of selling, then can you actually say with honesty that you are hurting for money where you are worried about paying for bills and food?

He also posted, “So no one cares about my family!! But I’m suppose to care about “everyone else” the irony. Very contradicting don’t you thing?”. Is your family in need of money? Would having these be the difference between eating tomorrow and not eating? Should the gambler who has spent their money at a casino and loses it be told oh it’s ok you did that because you were trying to just get more money to pay for food for your kids instead of just taking the money you already had. If you need money for your family because you are in a bad situation for money and you think spending the money you do have on the chance of an item selling more then the original price is something you think is ok, then what are you charging as a mark up price? What is the point where you go, I’m doing this for bills/kids money and I’m now doing it just so I can have $25,000 in my bank?

Though, I feel even if he reads this, it wouldn’t matter. Someone who has and does this knowingly and then brags about doing it, will not admit or even believe they did anything morally wrong. He has already shown in the twitter posts that he thinks what he is doing is ok and should be done so he can use that money. If you are going to do this, then don’t brag about doing it. You know and knew that people wanted this and that you can sell it for extremes amount of money so don’t brag about how you cheated the system so you can do it. If a football player cheated the system to win the game and then turned around and bragged about it, and then said, what I’m doing it for my kids, and no you can’t use that it wasn’t in the rules because Funko limited it to 1 per person so yes you broke the rules, so, is that player a person that should not have people angry with him? Does the action taken not only break the rules but breaks morality rules?